Israel’s unwarranted and outrageous attack upon the flotilla of ships carrying humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip is another sad reminder that the leaders of Israel are determined to indefinitely continue and defend the punishing and illegal blockade of the Gaza Strip and the continued isolation of the West Bank, which has caused and continues to cause immense suffering and loss of life for the Palestinian people. Deaf to the cries and condemnations of the international community, Israel has pursued a calculated policy of punishment and humiliation against the Palestinians, explicitly designed to create a permanent crisis in the region, thus further justifying Israel’s continued policy of separation and apartheid. From the terrible 2008 Gaza Massacre to Monday’s premeditated assault upon the Mavi Marmara, Israel has sent a clear signal to the international community that it has no intentions of either abiding by international or humanitarian law, or of negotiating in good faith with the Palestinian people. Faced, like South Africa in the 1980’s, with a clear demographical disadvantage, Israel has chosen to isolate its minority population in a last ditch effort to maintain its implicitly racist policy of Zionist rule.

Because of this, it is now more important than ever, that the institutions responsible for supporting and abetting Israel’s continued aggressions against the Palestinians, including the City University of New York, be forced, at the very least, to end their investment in any company that aids in any way the blockade, isolation, and occupation of the Palestinian territories. Since Hampshire College’s successful and groundbreaking disinvestment in companies that support the occupation of Palestine in 2009, there has been a growing student disinvestment campaign, which has spread to universities across the nation from UC Berkeley and UC San Diego, to Columbia and NYU. This movement is dedicated to convincing their college and university budget and finance committees to rearrange their investment portfolios so as to disinvest from companies such as: United Tech­nolo­gies, which man­u­fac­tures Black­hawk heli­copters used by the Israeli mil­i­tary, Gen­eral Elec­tric, which sup­plies the propul­sions sys­tems for Apache heli­copter gun­ships, also used by the Israeli Defense Forces, ITT Cor­po­ra­tion, which pro­vides night vision gog­gles to the Israeli mil­i­tary, Motorola, which is engaged in a $400 mil­lion project to pro­vide radar sys­tems for enhanc­ing secu­rity at ille­gal West Bank set­tle­ments, Terex, which pro­vides trucks for logis­ti­cal sup­port to the Israeli mil­i­tary, and Cater­pil­lar, which pro­vides many of the bull­doz­ers and con­struc­tion equip­ment used to build new set­tle­ments and to destroy Pales­tin­ian homes in the West Bank and Gaza. While this kind of disinvestment is a good start, the current intransigence of the Israeli government calls for more aggressive forms of disinvestment. Universities and other institutions should be encouraged not only to disinvest in companies that support the Israeli occupation and isolation of Palestine, but any companies that engage in direct business with or provide investment to Israel in any capacity.

Last March, The UC Berkeley Student Senate passed a resolution, supported in large part by the UC Berkeley Students for Justice in Palestine, (the resolution is reprinted below), urging the university to end all investments related to General Electric and United Technologies. The resolution passed the Student Senate but was callously vetoed by the Student Senate President Noah Stern. Currently UC Berkeley students are campaigning to overturn that veto, but UC President Mark Yudof, the same individual who recently raised UC tuition by 32%, has issued statements this month making it clear that the university policy supports disinvestment only in the case of genocide—a ridiculous and incredibly irresponsible high bar to set for taking action. While this may sound like a defeat, the resolution has gained steam and is being proposed at several other campuses in the UC system including UC San Diego and UC Riverside. It is time that the student government at CUNY including the Doctoral Students’ Council, The University Student Senate and the University Faculty Senate, took up the resolution as their own.

In the meantime, it will be imperative these next few weeks that those of us who care about the suffering and humiliation taking place in Gaza remain vocal and outspoken critics of Israel’s policy, and that we call on the US Government to unreservedly and critically condemn the attacks on the Mavi Marmara and the continued blockade of Gaza.

 Click here to see the full version of the “Bill in Support of UC Disinvestment from War Crimes”

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Increasing taxes, even upon the extremely wealthy, is not (and has never been) a very popular position in postwar America. According to a 2009 Harris poll conducted for the Tax Foundation, 56 percent of Americans believe they are paying too much in taxes; about half are opposed to taxes on soft drinks and junk food, and almost two thirds of those polled said they favored a complete elimination of the Federal Estate Tax. Although conducted by the Tax Foundation—which hides an arguably anti-tax bias in claims of bipartisanship and coded language about transparency and simplicity—these figures are nonetheless pretty consistent with the overall public sentiment since the end of the Second World War. In Gallup polls conducted from 1947 to 2009 a small majority of Americans regularly said their income taxes were too high; a slightly smaller group agreed that their taxes were just about right; while an extremely small minority, between 1 and 3 percent each year (communists no doubt!) said they thought their taxes were too low.

While this overall hostility toward higher taxes might be obvious to anyone who has studied the ideological underpinnings of American capitalism, or, for that matter, anyone who has been paying any attention to the recent “Tea Party” movement, these figures actually reveal a counterintuitive truth. Yes, almost all Americans have historically been opposed to increasing taxes, but they have also been near universally ambivalent about the taxes they already pay, regardless of how much or how little. Indeed, the poll numbers show that even during the periods of highest taxation (1950–1963) the average percentage of Americans who said their taxes were too high remained pretty consistent: about 56 percent. Compare this to the period of least taxation (1970–1990) when the top marginal tax rate plummeted from 70 to 30 percent, and the findings are startling. Even during this second period, which saw one of the greatest decreases in federal taxes ever (and consequently some of the most devastating cuts to state and federal spending, including the near complete devastation of New York City), the average percentage of Americans who said their tax rate was too high actually increased, from 56 to 61 percent. In other words, a small majority of Americans inevitably tend to complain about their taxes no matter how high or low those taxes actually are.

It is tempting to see this behavior as a kind of virtue; after all, an independent and inherently suspicious and critical populace is vital for any democracy; but the sad fact is that, no matter what the tea-baggers say, this knee jerk impulse against higher taxation is not driven by any grassroots distrust of the government as much as it is by corporate lobbying and simple, uninformed, and misguided greed. People generally want to keep as much of their money as possible, and they falsely believe that they know best how to spend it. Yet in the rush to hold onto what’s theirs, they often fail to see the bigger picture.

This resistance to taxation is a serious problem, however, for the Right has been extremely successful in manipulating America’s ingrained resistance to higher taxes and has managed, over the course of the last forty years, with the help of several Democrats, of course, to completely overturn what was once a relatively progressive tax system. Between 1951 and 1963, arguably some of the most prosperous and productive years in American History, the tax rate for those making more than $400,000 hovered around 91 percent. Today the top marginal tax rate, regardless of whether one makes $500,000 or $500 million, is only 35 percent. Considering that greater and greater amounts of wealth are being consolidated at higher and higher income levels, the result is a system where more and more money held by fewer and fewer people is being taxed at historically low levels. And yet, if one believes the polls, the people are as unwilling as ever to accept the fact that low taxes on the rich not only lead to poor services and crumbling infrastructures, but are responsible for much of our current ill-health, inequality, and general unhappiness.

As Tony Judt points out in his new book Ill Fares the Land, there is a direct negative correlation between income inequality and such shared social goods as health, happiness, and upward mobility. Measured against several other developed nations, including the United Kingdom, Germany, and Canada, the United States has the absolute greatest income inequality of any of these nations, with the exception of Great Britain, whose income inequality is only slightly lower. Consequently, the United States has an almost exactly opposite rate of social mobility, by far the lowest of all of the countries compared. Indeed, according to Judt, the percentage of a son’s income that can be explained by his father’s income has grown dramatically in the United States, from a historic low of 10 percent in 1980, to a whopping 32 percent in 2000. And yet, amazingly, the populists still clamor to abolish the estate tax! When it comes to health, the United States, sadly, fares even worse. Among the twenty developed countries Judt compares, the Unites States has the greatest income inequality as well as the worst health (as measured on the index of health and social problems), despite the fact that the United States spends, per capita, far more than any of the other countries Judt compares.

Although these findings clearly reveal that there is something fundamentally wrong with America, what really matters here is the obvious correlation between the virtues of health, happiness, and mobility, and income equality. The fact is that the greater the equality of any society, the higher the rates of happiness and general welfare. Until we learn to embrace this fact, until we learn to give up our ignorant resistance to higher taxes, and begin the long process of creating a fair and equitable tax system, we will remain little more than slaves to a flawed and corrupt ideology.

All of these conclusions then, for anyone interested in a fairer, more equitable and humane society, provide both a sense of hope and despair, for they reveal simultaneously that increasing taxes will be difficult, but also that higher taxes, once passed, would likely not be met with any greater hostility than our current tax rate, especially if those passing them can make the necessary connections between happiness and income equality. The political implications of these facts, however, are enormous, for they suggest that any president or congressperson willing to do the right thing and increase taxes significantly would face a lot of potential opposition in the next election. If Barack Obama is serious about his legacy, he will take that risk and take it soon. The longer we postpone real tax reform, the less time there will be for the American public to get used to it.

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            In a recent article, the New York Daily News reported that, although the great majority of CUNY’s more than 450,000 students are of black, Latino, or Asian origins, a predominant amount (about two-thirds) of the faculty members who teach those students are, not surprisingly, white. This lack of faculty representation is appalling, and all CUNY students, whether of color or not, should be concerned about the underlying forms of racial and ethnic inequality this fact represents. However, as bad as these figures are, there is another, equally insidious form of inequality actually built into the CUNY system: the inequality between the exploited adjuncts who teach the majority of classes at the university and the tenured and tenure-track faculty who enjoy the majority of the limited wages and benefits provided by the administration. While faculty diversity at CUNY may have stagnated and may still have a long way to go, the inequality between adjunct and tenure-track professors has actually continued to increase at an alarming pace.

            Consider the following comparison. The ordinary assistant professor at a CUNY senior college usually teaches no more than three courses per semester at most, and makes on average upwards of $65,000 a year. The average adjunct lecturer, on the other hand, teaching the same number of courses, to many of the same students at the same college, makes on average only about $18,000 a year. Additionally, adjunct lecturers receive few, if any, of the extensive benefits enjoyed by an assistant professor, and almost none of the prestige and respect. Not counting the significant value of health and pension benefits, this means that the average non-adjunct faculty member makes at least $47,000 a year more than the average adjunct for much of the same work. Just a few years ago, before the Professional Staff Congress (PSC) finalized the current contract, that gap would have been about $43,000. Although the percentage difference is relatively the same, the actual gap in wages has continued to increase with each new contract. This is because the PSC, which represents both adjunct and non-adjunct faculty, has historically insisted on across the board wage increases for all of the employees it represents. While this decision to offer identical percentage increases to all union members may seem egalitarian on the surface, the result has been an ever widening salary gap between the haves and have nots at CUNY.

            Despite the huge disparity in wages, a CUNY adjunct nonetheless does much of the same work as an assistant professor. For instance both adjunct and non-adjunct faculty members spend significant amounts of their time preparing lectures or class notes, developing syllabi, attending department meetings and professional development workshops, keeping regular office hours, advising students, writing letters of recommendation, performing community service, and, of course, creating, presenting, and publishing original scholarly research in their fields. To be fair, the requirements for tenure and the expectations for publication, as well as the amount of committee work, are intense for an assistant professor, and should not be underestimated. Yet pressures on adjuncts are no less intense, as they struggle to write their own book (the thesis), publish articles, and manage the various responsibilities of grad school life.  And it goes without saying that they are a vital and indispensible part of the university and therefore deserve to be treated as such.

            Winning respect, however, will not be easy. There are many who benefit from the two-tier system within the union and the university at large who would like to pretend there is no problem or, worse, think that by offering small concessions they can silence any opposition to further inequality and across the board wage increases. The first step in overcoming these forces and achieving greater faculty equality is to insure that our voices are heard and that adjuncts and graduate students at CUNY are properly represented by their union. On Tuesday April 6, the President of the PSC, Barbara Bowen, will be holding a contract discussion meeting at 12:30 in room 9205 of the Graduate Center. It is essential that adjuncts and graduate students who show up to this meeting be prepared with a list of real demands and a set of plausible rebuttals and arguments. Given the current state budget problems, the specter of austerity will no doubt be used again as an excuse for postponing any attempts to dismantle the two-tier labor system. While some adjuncts and graduate students might be content to  allow themselves to be further exploited by seeking small fellowship increases, changes to workload restrictions, or longer contracts of continuous employment, it is imperative that we move beyond these petty ameliorations and address the fundamental inequalities of the two-tier labor system. CUNY adjuncts and graduate students represent the largest segment of workers both at CUNY and within the PSC and it is time that administration and the union began to recognize that. The adjuncts at CUNY must do more than merely complain; instead, we must begin to make real demands and offer real alternatives.

            In this spirit, I would like to put forward the following three proposals as a starting point for future contract demands.

1. Increase the number of tenure-track faculty over the course of the contract by 1,000, with half of those new positions set aside exclusively for qualified CUNY adjuncts and graduate students:

While it is important to improve the working conditions of adjuncts at CUNY, the university must also address the fundamental ethical and pedagogical problems inherent in the use of adjunct labor by simultaneously reducing the number of future adjuncts while increasing the number of tenured and tenure-track faculty. In addition, the union must be urged to resist the awful compromise of dedicated full-time conversion lines, which, because they offer subpar wages, no tenure, and little real job security, only perpetuate the vast inequalities between the various faculty types, undermine tenure, and create yet another tier of faculty.

2. Begin to close the gap between adjunct and non-adjunct faculty by getting rid of across-the-board raises and increasing adjunct faculty wages by an additional 20 percent over the life of the contract. 

Although this may sound like a no-brainer, this kind of increase will be incredibly controversial, especially for the tenured and tenure-track faculty who would by necessity have to take a smaller raise in order to increase wages for adjuncts. Despite the controversial nature of this move, however, this is the only way to address the growing gap in wage inequality at CUNY, and adjuncts should be prepared to vote NO on any contract that does not include some kind of significant differential increase in adjunct wages. If implemented this modest measure would shrink the annual income gap between a full-time adjunct and an assistant professor by approximately $3,600 over the life of the contract. Although this is an obviously small amount it is an important beginning and adjuncts would have to continue to struggle to insure that future contract negotiations would continue to chip away at this inequality till such time as an adjunct at the top step teaching six courses per year is paid no less than two-thirds of the average wage for an assistant professor at CUNY. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education the average salary for an assistant professor at Lehman College in the 2008–2009 academic year was $64,700, meaning an adjunct lecturer making just two-thirds of an assistant professor’s salary would be making approximately $43,100. Though this is not much, it is a livable wage and would be fair compensation for all the work that adjuncts do.

3. Provide adjunct faculty teaching at least two courses per semester with all of the same benefits as tenure track faculty, including full health insurance coverage, paid family and parental leave, and pension benefits.

Ironically one of the most devastating advances in the last contract was the paid parental leave benefit. The union fought hard to win this vital benefit for its tenured and tenure-track faculty, giving up other advances (thus is the nature of contract negotiations), but no adjuncts, even those teaching four and five classes per semester (who, under any measure would be considered full-time employees) are eligible. This kind of separate and unequal treatment of faculty, where one group is held to be more deserving of fundamental benefits like decent health insurance and paid parental and family leave, is unacceptable.    

Solving the problem of the two-tier labor system at CUNY will not be easy, especially given the current economic crisis, but now is our chance to set the agenda for the struggle that needs to follow.

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—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Last November, as many of you will no doubt remember, students and faculty at the University of California staged a series of protests and building takeovers in response to the UC Regents’ decision on November 19 to increase undergraduate tuition by a whopping 32 percent. After the announcement that the increase had been approved, students and faculty took several actions: some refused to attend or teach classes, others took over campus buildings, while still others rallied outside administrators’ homes and on campuses across the state for several days, demanding that the hikes be repealed and state funding restored. Despite these rallies and the incredible amount of public outcry they helped generate, nothing was done to roll back or even ameliorate the situation. Instead, the administration explained away any responsibility for their actions, claiming simply that their hands were tied. Afterwards, the presidents of the several colleges, rather than rally with their students to take on Sacramento, chose instead to call in the police. In the wake of that decision several hundred students were arrested or suspended and scores more were beaten, detained, maced, or otherwise harassed by local police.

For many ordinary observers, the tuition increases at the University of California were seen as the inevitable result of state cuts to higher education, which were themselves the result of the recent economic crisis that has left both California and New York reeling from lost tax revenues. Although this is certainly part of the equation, there is another, arguably more important and certainly more insidious reason why the UC Regents found it so easy to pass such unprecedented tuition increases at a university that, like CUNY, used to be free. The answer is simple: the tuition increases will not affect them, their future, or their children’s future. The sad truth is that nearly all of the regents at the University of California, like the members of the Board of Trustees at CUNY, have no real stake in what happens to the students or faculty they supposedly represent. Instead, their loyalties are to the ideological whims of the politicians and bureaucrats who appointed or hired them, and upon whom their future employment and professional success is dependent.

Although the regents may have indeed imagined they were responding to an unavoidable crisis, the erosion of funding for state universities, from California to New York, is not merely the result of any one economic disaster, but represents instead an oligarchic, systematic, and ideologically driven attempt to privatize the nation’s several dozen state university systems by starving them of government funding and forcing them to charge more tuition while simultaneously seeking out further forms of corporate sponsorship to stay afloat. This process of corporate transformation is not merely a threat from politicians and ideologues outside the university, however, but is, more often than not, being carried out by those on the very inside, those like UC President Mark Yudof and CUNY Board of Trustees Chair Benno Schmidt who seem dedicated to the idea of drowning their respective universities in the proverbial bathtub.

This structure of de facto corporate and political governance, so indicative of the new university, is nowhere more cynically self-evident than at CUNY, where the Chancellor recently welcomed the idea of radically increasing tuition, and the Chair of the BOT is also the Vice Chairman of an organization (Edison Learning) whose sole mission is the privatization of public education. This disconnect between the needs of the students and the ideological interests of its leaders exists in part because the City University of New York is currently governed by an incredibly hierarchical and dysfunctional structure of organizations and representatives ranging from an extremely powerful Board of Trustees, a moderately influential chancellor, several university presidents who are mostly beholden to the board and the chancellor, and a very loose coalition of faculty and student senates and organizations whose decisions, concerns, and protests are frequently ignored or overlooked. While the Chancellor ostensibly has control over the future direction of the university, his appointment is always contingent upon the approval of the Board of Trustees. Likewise, all of the college presidents, including our own Bill Kelly, are appointed only on the approval of the Board of Trustees. The students and faculty, meanwhile, have practically no formal representation when it comes to the future direction of the university where they work and study.

It is time that all of the stakeholders involved, including the students, staff, and faculty of CUNY, as well as the unions and organizations that represent them, begin to agitate for democratic reforms of the University’s governance structure in an effort to shake the monkey of corporate control off their backs once and for all. It is not enough to merely have the freedom to oversee the academic aspects of our work and to pursue our research and teaching unimpeded; we must also insist that we be directly involved in the larger economic and structural aspects of the university, paying attention to and taking control over the processes and decisions that so profoundly affect our day to day experiences.

The first place to begin this effort would be with a complete restructuring of the Board of Trustees. Currently the board consists of seventeen members, ten of which are appointed by the governor and five by the mayor. The remain­ing two non-appointed mem­bers of the board include the head of the Uni­ver­sity Stu­dent Sen­ate and the chair of the Uni­ver­sity Fac­ulty Sen­ate, the last of whom, because of supposed col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing con­flicts, sits with­out a vote. This means that of the seventeen members only two are actually stakeholders who have any real interest in the well being of the university, and of those two only one is allowed to vote. The fifteen members who make up the rest of the board, as the GC Advocate has reported several times in the past, are almost exclusively composed of persons whose primary experience and interests are in the business sector. The students and faculty of the university, meanwhile have absolutely no say in who is appointed to the board.

It should be obvious to anyone who believes in the idea of democratic self rule that the university belongs as much to the students, staff, and faculty as it does to the residents of the State of New York; and instead of allowing the governor and mayor to stack the deck with friends and political appointees, many of whom are sorely unqualified, we should insist that the size of the board be dramatically increased so that there is at the very least an equal balance between the interests of the state and the several groups of stakeholders of which the university is composed. Although the specifics of such a plan would no doubt involve a significant amount of nuanced legislation, the principle of equal representation is a good place to begin.

Instead of one student and one token, largely powerless faculty member, the board should be expanded to include one elected student representative, one elected faculty member, and one elected staff member from each of the eleven senior colleges, the six community colleges, and the Graduate Center for a total of seventeen students, seventeen faculty members, and seventeen staff members. Each of these members would have a full and equal vote in all decisions made by the Board of Trustees, except for the faculty and staff members, who would be able to vote on all decisions except those directly related to contract negotiations. Add to this an additional two gubernatorial or mayoral appointments, or perhaps two City Council appointments chosen by the City Council Higher Education Committee, and the BOT would be fairly balanced between the interests of the city and state, the staff, the students, and the faculty. Under such a structure, there would no doubt be much more debate, much less rubber stamping, and much more innovation. Most importantly, though, there would be a much greater concern for the interests of those whom the university was originally meant to serve. 

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The recent round of student protests and building take-overs at campuses across the University of California system this week have been both inspiring and heart-breaking. The devastating and unprecedented 32 percent increase in student “fees” (the UC system’s way of getting around using the word “tuition”) approved by the UC regents on November 19 reminds us of just how short-sighted, stupid, and callous most university administrations have been in their response to state budget cuts across the country. Instead of standing up to Sacramento and demanding restoration of cuts, UC President Mark Yudof told reporters after the vote: “Our hand has been forced. When you don’t have any money, you don’t have any money.” This is, of course, easy for Mr. Yudof to say whose first year salary was $828,000 and whose $10,000 a month house in Oakland, the New York Times reports, is entirely paid for by the University.
Instead of throwing up his hands and saying there is nothing he can do, why did Yudof not threaten to resign? Why not encourage the regents, all of them who voted for this disastrous increase, to do the same and resign unless the state restores the cuts? Why not work with his students to oppose these cuts rather than kowtowing to the whims of the state? The answers to these questions are clear: because the governance of the UC system, like so many university systems across the nation, is such that administrators and regents and presidents and trustees see themselves as somehow at odds with the faculty and students whom they are supposed to serve. The trend of corporate-structured oversight of public universities has brought those institutions to their knees and until this is changed there is little hope that these kinds of cuts will not continue.
Equally heartbreaking was the relatively low turnout in response to these increases. Instead of thousands, even tens of thousands of students protesting at every campus across the UC, the biggest protests never reached more than 1,500 people and although some campus buildings were taken over and strikes called, they seem to be having little impact on the actual functioning of the schools, which continued with their business as usual, despite the noise of protest all around.
Nonetheless, these demonstrations were inspiring for several reasons. First of all, despite the relatively low numbers (considering the nature of the increases), the protests were aggressive and vocal and received an enormous amount of national and local press. At UCLA on the day of the vote, protestors attempted to block vans bringing the regents onto the campus, heckled regents as they crossed the university toward the meeting site, were maced and beaten by police, and then after the vote, surrounded the building linked arm in arm, refusing to let the regents leave for more than three hours before they were dispersed by police in riot gear. Simultaneously, students across the system, including Berkeley, Davis, and Santa Cruz began large protests and building takeovers. Until Saturday night, administrative buildings and classrooms were still being occupied on several campuses. More than seventy students at UC Santa Cruz were arrested Sunday morning after a three day takeover of a building there, where they were in close negotiations with the UCSC administration over demands. These responses show that students are ready and willing to put their bodies and their futures on the line against the police and the callous UC administration. In resisting these tuition hikes as they have, the UC students have managed to raise the bar yet again, setting a very different kind of precedent, which might well be the start of a much bigger, more organized and, more permanent form of campus resistance.
But what does all of this mean for us? What lessons can we at CUNY take from these protests and demonstrations? After all, we are also facing yet another round of tuition increases, cuts, layoffs, and service reductions. What can and should we be doing now to prepare to resist these cuts? The first thing to be learned from the UC protests is that there is strength in numbers and any successful student protest campaign must make sure that it has the support of a majority of the student body and that those students are fully educated as to the nature of the protests and why those protests are in their best interest. One of the most disheartening things about following these protests were the number of UC students who seemed unconcerned about the cuts or who were actively angry at the protestors for disrupting the campus. While this may not have been the majority of students, the fact is that many students, for whatever reason, still went to class, and still allowed the university to keep functioning. Why they were not with their fellow students on the lawns protesting or at least refusing to attend class is a mystery, but the fact is that without the support of these groups no protest will be truly successful.
In addition to recruiting students to the cause, it is imperative that any campus resistance also include a good share of professors and lecturers who are willing to call in sick, cancel classes, or hold classes off campus until demands are met. Although a handful of radical UC professors vowed to do this (three of them actually appearing live on Democracy Now! to announce their intentions to honor the strike) they seem to have had little impact so far, and as we go to press on there have been few reports of any significant continuing protest on any of the UC campuses.
The other big lesson to take away from these events is that university administrations clearly do not care about the interests or the welfare of the students they represent. Not only did President Yudof and the regents refuse to do anything to stop the cuts, they allowed campus presidents and UC police to brutally disband several of the protests and building takeovers. At Berkeley, police in riot gear shoved and dragged students out of Wheeler Hall, while students at UCLA were maced, beaten with billy clubs and otherwise harassed by police. Some students are even facing charges of felony burglary for refusing to leave Wheeler Hall. This kind of zero tolerance, life-destroying retribution sends a chilling signal to all of the other students who might be tempted to protest or disrupt campus activities as a form of political action.
Surely the situation is dire for students across the country and it is becoming increasingly clear that dealing with the attacks on public education one extraordinary case at a time may not be the best strategy. Perhaps it is time that students began to create and re-create national student resistance organizations in response to the budget cuts and tuition hikes that are afflicting campuses everywhere. These organizations should not only be ready to organize and help coordinate massive student strikes, walkouts, and building takeovers, but should encourage higher education unions to form solidarity coalitions in an effort to tackle these problems at the legislative level as well. These organizations must agitate not only for laws that limit tuition increases and guarantee funding, but must also push for new legislation to reform university governance at large state and city university systems like UC, CUNY, and SUNY. While legislative action is often slow and full of awful compromise, when backed up with a powerful movement willing to put bodies on the street, and willing to face arrest and police brutality, it can be a powerful tool for creating real change. “Students and workers united,” as one recent protest chant put it, “will never be defeated.”
Whatever the strategy, though, it is clear that something significant must be done soon to end the economic violence against the working and middle classes. The creeping decades-long trend of budget cuts, even during periods of so-called “economic growth,” has seriously and perhaps irreversibly undermined the very foundations of public higher education. The students at UC are not only fighting for their own educations but are also fighting to insure that their children will someday have access to the excellent and affordable education they deserve.

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“To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

Last semester I picked up a $1,000 check from City College for a faculty development workshop that I participated in over the winter break. The workshop was designed to introduce interested faculty to the uses of technology in the classroom and was, no surprise, sponsored by Verizon. As a struggling graduate student who finds himself consistently behind on the rent, I was delighted to receive the money, but part of me feels bad (well almost) since it turns out I really have no intention now, nor did I ever, really, of using any more technology in my classroom than I normally would. In fact, instead of instilling in me a sense of possibility and excitement, the workshop made me deeply suspicious of the supposed pedagogical value of technology in general. Although it helped me realize that there are, indeed, several kinds of fascinating and interesting things you can do with web applications both in and out of class, I remained unconvinced that using those technologies would actually help my students to better learn the things that matter: how to be, for instance, a thoughtful and contemplative person capable of formulating, analyzing, critiquing, and communicating difficult and original ideas.

The leader of the workshop was, I am quite proud to say, an old student of mine from Hunter College who is now getting his PhD at the Graduate Center and is the head of the Writing Center at my campus. For the entire eight hours, he led the faculty members present that day through a series of exercises that were meant to introduce us to web-based applications that we could use to “help students learn.” While I was familiar with most of the applications and platforms that were being introduced, I had never thought of using any of them in the classroom. From Google and Wikipedia, to YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, WordPress, and Facebook, we talked about the potential pedagogical value of these various information, publishing, and social networking platforms. It was a stretch, but we did our best to articulate the different ways we might use these programs or services in our classrooms. The idea of using blogs and Facebook pages was especially popular, as was the idea of using YouTube videos as learning tools.

After the workshop I felt obligated to think more about the ways that I could use some of this technology to help my students learn better, and, since I had to write a report on precisely that subject in order to qualify for the stipend, I spent a good amount of time contemplating my options. The more I wrote and the more I reflected on my thoughts, however, the more I realized that I didn’t want to use any technology in my classroom: not this semester, not next, and if I could help it, not ever. In fact, the more I tried to justify and find a place for technology, the more I kept thinking about what was being lost. Sure, showing a YouTube video is a fine way to generate conversation, but it is the conversation, and not the act of watching a video that really matters, and in an English class, where the subject is language itself, does it really make sense to show a video? Technology, no doubt, provides a vast array of new options, but do we really need more of these kinds of options, and do any of them actually aid in the learning process or simply provide us with a temporary distraction from it? What are we sacrificing when we introduce new technologies into the curriculum? And what kinds of messages are we sending to our students?

In an age of increasing technological innovation and scientific breakthrough it is easy to get caught up in the idea that, as educators, we must prepare our students for the brave new worlds that await them. As our lives and our relationships with others become more and more mediated through the use of technology, it only seems reasonable that we should teach our students how to use those new technologies to their advantage. To question this assumption, to ask why seems like a selfish, almost churlish endeavor, designed to actively cheat our students out of their right to self-empowerment. Nonetheless, once the question is asked the answers become increasingly complicated.

First of all, the use of this kind of technology in the classroom not only assumes that it will remain a viable and useful tool (rather than, say, going the way of the card catalog) but that the use of such technologies is a societal good. The idea that the university or academy, funded by Verizon, should feel obliged to keep pace with the entrepreneurial fits of the World Wide Web, or that we should feel ashamed not to be on top of the latest marketing device disguised as a communication platform, seems shortsighted.

Indeed, one of the things that frightens me most about the often uncritical embrace of technology in the classroom is the way that it potentially dehumanizes the educational experience, where students spend more and more time both in and out of class looking at video screens, computer monitors, Blackberries, and iPhones, rather than looking at the world around them, talking to each other, or most importantly, spending time alone with their thoughts. Sure, constant e-mail, tweeting, texting, and ironic Facebook updates may feel like meaningful communication, but what’s really being communicated besides a desperate desire for the type of community that without the distance digital communication makes possible would already exist?

What concerns me most, however, is not what we are introducing into our classrooms—after all, I admit a preference for polished, word processed documents instead of smudgy handwritten ones—but what we might be losing. I’d like to make the argument that, despite our increasingly technological lives, or perhaps because of them, the creation and conservation of technology-free spaces where people can, and are encouraged, to communicate face-to-face, free of distraction, with nothing more than their unique temperaments and their private store of knowledge and eloquence, may be more important than ever. Our students are already attention-deprived and overloaded. The idea of forcing them back onto the Internet, especially to privately owned, for-profit websites like Facebook and YouTube, as part of their schoolwork, seems at best counterproductive, and at worst incredibly irresponsible, even unethical. Instead, shouldn’t we be encouraging our students to carve out spaces of time for themselves that are free from the distractions of the market and the market driven popular culture that typifies the Internet. Shouldn’t we be encouraging them to be skeptical and critical of this mass culture, or better yet, encouraging them to ignore it completely. Should we not be inviting them instead to think in full sentences; to write more than 140 characters at a time; and to have the self reliance and self sufficiency to be alone with themselves and their thoughts for more than the seven or eight hours they spend unconscious each night.

As a profession we seem to have thoughtlessly embraced the idea of technology precisely because we see it as a way of making learning easier and more accessible for more of our students. Obviously—the logic goes—our students are comfortable using the Internet and social networking tools, so why not allow them to use those skills to learn? This kind of thinking is common among instructors who embrace popular culture because they think it will help their students “relate” to the course material. These are the same teachers who spend class time screening Hollywood versions of Shakespeare because students are supposedly incapable of understanding modern Elizabethan English or who teach rap lyrics or song lyrics as poetry, because it’s easier for students to get the difference between a tenor and a vehicle when it’s Tupac or Bob Dylan speaking rather than Dylan Thomas or Langston Hughes. But our calling as educators extends beyond merely providing our students with opportunities to learn material. As educators we are also responsible for providing our students with experiences which they would not otherwise have access to, such as the experiences that result from finding solutions to difficult problems, engaged and thoughtful conversation, and collegial argument. But even more than this, it is important that we offer our students alternatives to the kinds of experiences provided by the technology of mass media. If we are going to insist on teaching them how to get by in the corporate world they’ve been given, we need to at least teach them that other worlds are still possible. 

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—The Clash
“Government…bullshit
Black and white… fight”

—The Subhumans

At first the talk was all about the prospects of a “post-racial” America. Obama’s success among white voters (he received a larger percentage of the white vote than any democratic candidate since Carter) and the lack of any recordable “Bradley effect,” caused many white (and a handful of black) commentators to ponder the possibility that America had perhaps finally transcended its bitter history of racial injustice. Today, after months of racially charged populist outrage, this talk seems not only hopelessly optimistic and naive, but just plain ignorant. Indeed, former president Jimmy Carter, himself no political cynic, recently found it necessary to point out and condemn the racialized rhetoric of the largely white anti-government movement that has sprung up since Obama’s victory, and while we should all be extremely concerned about the potentially negative consequences of such rhetoric, it’s causes and its sources seem to be a lot more complicated than just good old-fashioned Southern white-supremacy. Underneath the resentment and anger, the Nazi iconography, and the subtle and not so subtle racial slights, there is a real and justifiable sense of outrage that has been overlooked, and more often than not, cynically denigrated by the left, which is usually more sympathetic to anti-establishmentarian displays of public anger.

The organizers of these various protests are mostly neo-libertarian and conservative free-market groups who advocate an extreme federalist interpretation of the constitution, small government, and abolition of the income tax (some even going so far as to advocate for the elimination of public schools). However, the people showing up to these protests appear to be pretty ordinary working– and middle-class people who for the most part appear to be either oblivious, confused, or unsure about what exactly their movement is really about. Like the left, whose protests were sometimes rightfully criticized for not having a central agenda, these protests seem to be more about expressing a populist sense of fear and anger in solidarity with others who share those emotions. That this outrage has now taken a racial turn should come as no surprise to students of American history, for the white masses, easily manipulated by factious political and economic interests, have often tended to blame black and immigrant underclasses whenever things start to go wrong. The fact that a nominal member of that historical underclass has now proven that “even a black man” can be president, has only added to the sense of economic insecurity that has fueled such bouts of racial antagonism in the past, making people who before were very little of one or the other, at once both more racist and more political.

Incited by the idiot rantings and barely contained racial and xenophobic prejudices of Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs, these protestors believe that Obama is the source of all of their suffering; and his skin color, his Arabic name, his activist background, and questions about his national origin, all make him an easy scapegoat for the fears and insecurities of middle America, as well as an irresistible magnet for those Brooks Brother’s bigots and middle class nationalists already convinced by Dobbs and others that African Americans and immigrants are somehow the source of all their problems. This kind of scapegoating can be seen throughout American history, including the Jim Crow south, where fears of black retribution and congressional representation sent the white masses into paroxysms of social panic. But the subtle insinuations of violence and racial satire exhibited by many of these protestors is nothing compared to the outright murderous race riots of the nineteenth century. In New York alone there were two major race riots from 1834–5, which ended in the burning and destruction of black and abolitionist homes and establishments, and just like the Draft Riots of 1863, these events were more about economics than race; more about jobs than slavery. Now, as then, the general bigotry, distrust, and fear exhibited toward Obama has a lot more to do with social and economic insecurity than with any actual belief that whites or Anglo-Saxons are somehow superior to Africans or Hispanics.

Although the protesters opposed to public healthcare and the stimulus package have been desperately misdirected and misinformed, the underlying anger that has made those protests possible is palpable and significant. Like Americans across the country many of these protestors, now living on unemployment for maybe the first time in their lives, have seen their jobs disappear almost overnight and have watched as their paychecks failed to keep pace with the cost of their healthcare or their rent. Many of them, no doubt, have seen their mortgage payments increase dramatically even as the value of their homes has continued to plummet. They’ve watched their sons and daughters, their grandchildren, and their neighbors shipped off to Afghanistan and Iraq, even as their school districts have scrambled to do more with a lot less. And all of them have suffered from the fallout of one of the biggest economic meltdowns in the last eighty years, and have watched in mostly silent anger as those responsible for that crisis have continued to prosper from a combination of corporate bonuses and government bailouts.

Simply put these people are angry and easily attracted to any movement that promises them a sense of control and a feeling of belonging. And for this the Left is not without blame. Instead of coming to their aid the Democratic Party and the bi-coastal academic left (obsessed with identity politics and oblivious to the suffering of ordinary working-class America) has been content to poke fun at the stupidity and ignorance of the middle and working classes that make up a good portion of the country’s interior. As factories closed and Wal-Mart began its anti-labor occupation of the Mid-West and the South, Democratic politicians did nothing to help and much to exacerbate the problem, while culturally enlightened liberals fled, as they always have, for the Hollywood hills and the towers of Manhattan. Safe in their glass cages they asked themselves “what’s wrong with Kansas” even as they watched the rest of the nation sink first into a coma of post-consumption debt fueled by years of wage stagnation and lender greed, and then slowly into joblessness and eventual bankruptcy.

Instead of uniting working-class blacks and whites to fight together for greater representation of their shared interests, the left was content to spend its time talking about identity and equal opportunity, teaching college kids how to be nice and eventually how to use their new found skills and political correctness to get ahead of their less enlightened peers of all races from Iowa and Oklahoma, Georgia and South Carolina. The idea of social solidarity and class consciousness that was at the core of the left’s historical agenda has been replaced with an ethos of technocratic equality and a vision of a multi-ethnic rainbow of ruling elites. Blacks like Obama who attended Harvard now have a greater chance of becoming a politician or corporate lawyer than ever, but the chance of a black man or a group of black workers joining or forming a union is as low as it’s been in almost a century.

Clearly any party interested in its own future will at least recognize the political potential of this new group of left-behinds and seek to find better more suitable ways to channel that anger into more constructive protest. But this is unlikely. The Democratic Party’s bungled health care bill (which is looking more and more like a boon for the health insurance companies) and its virtual abandonment of card check legislation (which would guarantee a significant increase in national union membership) shows all too well that it has neither the power or the inclination to push through the much needed social changes that in themselves would create greater equality and solidarity among all the working classes regardless of race or ethnicity. That so many could be so easily convinced to act against their own interests is indeed a testament to the power of racial and class identification. That middle class America has been largely abandoned by the same party that helped create it is symptomatic of the nature of political entropy, and the fact that the Democratic Party is now seeing such anger directed at its own president is no surprise.

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“The imagination is man’s power over nature.” –Wallace Stevens

It happens to all of us at one time or another. The blank page, the blinking cursor, the creeping and debilitating panic, the constant distractions, the getting up and walking around and sitting back down and getting up and walking around again. Usually it can be overcome by a force of will, an exertion of ego–as Mailer thought–the suspension of critical judgment, and a lot of furious freewriting. Sometimes, however, like an unwelcome obsession, it can take hold of you and whole hours, evenings, entire days simply disappear.

For the last two days, I have done nothing but bang my head against the wall of my windowless office trying to come up with something to say for this, the last GC Advocate of the year. Swine Flu, Bird Flu, Fox News, Arlen Specter’s defection, Air Force One, Obama’s first 100 days…nothing seemed to click. I had heard somewhere that former Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham used to spend the afternoon at the bar knocking back martinis before coming up with “Notebook” articles for the magazine, so I figured, what the hell. A few pints at O’Reilly’s couldn’t hurt, and at least I’d be blocked and drunk instead of just blocked, which is no fun sober.

Sitting in O’Reilly’s talking to a friend, I realized, like an epiphany, that one of the reasons I was having so much trouble is that I had spent the last couple of weeks working daily and diligently on my dissertation, and that I was so happily wrapped up in the otherworldly esoteric intricacies of that work that the thought of writing about something as pedestrian as politics was not only uninspiring but on a certain level repugnant. My head was in academia, and for once so was my heart, and I realized I was blocked precisely because I did not want to write or even have to think about CUNY politics and Chancellor Goldstein, the pathetic job market ahead of me, or the beat down the NYPD delivered to those poor New School students last month. I wanted to be left alone to write my dissertation in peace, and to hell with the rest of it. But how, I thought, was I supposed to write about poetry and the value of modernist aesthetics when the world of torture memos and suicide bombings kept knocking at my open door? This dilemma, of course, is nothing new, and one that many graduate students are intimately acquainted with. In a world full of so many problems it is not always easy to see how one’s own work connects to the bigger picture.

As I enter that magical ninth year at the Graduate Center (Louis Menand told the New York Times “it often takes about nine years to complete a dissertation in English”) I am quickly beginning to feel like one of those sorry saps I swore I would never become: ABD and out of funding, roaming the stacks of the GC library year in and year out, utterly demoralized and obsessed with their own insignificance. Of course, it is easy to become distracted and disheartened by the daily indignities and seeming immateriality of graduate life and work, and I cannot begin to count the number of times I have had this discussion with friends of mine. And of course, any conversation of more than two or three humanities students inevitably leads to the fateful: “why did I become a graduate student?” “I could have been a doctor or a lawyer.” “I could be out there, really doing something, making a difference, or at least making a living, but instead I’m sitting here trying to figure out the difference between ontological and epistemological.”

In no profession, except perhaps politics itself, is one more keenly aware that one’s ambitions and one’s current condition are so far apart, or more desperately afraid to consider what one has given up. In no profession, either, is one more aware of the distance between what one studies and the “actual world” that, at least on the surface of things, seems to do just fine without you and all of your “intellectual labor.”

The world of our imagination (that is, the world of our ideals and our ambitions, our visions of what is noble, right, and good), as poet Wallace Stevens knew, is periodically under assault from the pressure of a reality that cares nothing about our happiness or sense of value. Stevens also knew that the imagination was itself a weapon, “a violence from within that protects us from a violence without,” and that the surest resistance to a hostile reality was not always the most direct. We may rally and we may fight, we may (and probably should) take over our administrative buildings and college campuses and tell our governor where he can put his new budget; but we must also do the work of the imagination. We must write the dissertations and the books, and the boring, overly annotated journal articles, not only because they will eventually, with luck and plenty of patience, get us a steady and decent position, but because they provide us with the ammunition to defend ourselves from the daily onslaught of bad news and injustices that typify our times.

Faced with nothing but a blank page and a world of often overwhelming violence, it is our obligation not only to recount the hard facts of that world in all of their immediacy, but to draft the possibilities, the subversions, and the alternatives necessary for continually transforming and structuring those facts in more satisfying and meaningful ways. 

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“Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor.” –Thomas Jefferson

“Hey baby, nobody suffers like the poor!” –Charles Bukowski

I know it’s difficult, especially for the majority of GC students facing several years of fruitless job searches and adjunct lecturing in pursuit of that coveted $55,000 a year tenure track gig; but take a minute and imagine what it would be like to make $200,000 a year. For most of us this number must seem outrageously large: four or five times our current yearly wages and a lot more than even the most well paid and distinguished professor makes at CUNY; but nonetheless, give it a shot.

How would your life be different? Would you finally be able to afford your own apartment instead of giving your money to a landlord or living with roommates? Would you finally feel secure enough to let your spouse take time off from work to have a child, and would you take comfort in the fact that your child would grow up in a safe and healthy environment? Would you be able to set aside a college fund and make sure that they received the best education and health care available? Would you take vacations in Europe or the Caribbean, eat at more of the great restaurants New York has to offer, or become a subscriber to the Metropolitan Opera? Of course you could do any or all of these things if you made $200,000 a year. In fact with a lifetime of that kind of income you could easily retire in your early sixties and spend a significant part of your adult life doing whatever you liked, volunteering your time in a meaningful way that helped make the world a better place. Indeed, let’s face it, regardless of what you might think about the rich or how much you believe, like Roger Waters, that money “is the root of all evil today,” life would be pretty good if you made just that much money wouldn’t it?

Now imagine if you were making $250,000 or $300,000 or even $3million; would those extra dollars really make you any happier? Would more vacations or a more expensive house really make your life any more fulfilling? Perhaps for some of you they would, but the fact is that even a moderate amount of income, much less than $250,000 can sustain great happiness. As Harvard University psychologist Daniel Gilbert writes in his book Stumbling on Happiness: “Americans who earn $50,000 per year are much happier than those who earn $10,000 per year…but Americans who earn $5 million per year are not much happier than those who earn $100,000 per year.” In other words, regardless of the actual dollar amounts, Gilbert’s findings make it clear that after a certain level of basic comfort and security, more wealth does not mean more happiness. The sad part is that even that basic level of comfort and security is becoming more and more difficult to attain, as fewer and fewer people control larger amounts of the nation’s wealth.

So if many of us would be delighted to make even a mere $150,000 a year, and the facts indicate that much more than that doesn’t really seem to make anyone any happier, why does the New York State income tax system insist on taking the same percentage of income from those who have little or nothing to spare as it does from those who already have more than enough, and according to Gilbert would suffer nothing should they take home a little less each year? Why is it that, given the state’s record breaking budget deficit, the governor, rather than increasing taxes on those who already have everything they need, is instead proposing to raise costs and slash services for those who can least afford to pay more or to go with less?

Not only does Governor Paterson want to slash Medicaid, which obviously affects only those without adequate health insurance (i.e. the poor) but as we have all heard, he is also planning to increase tuition at CUNY and SUNY campuses by a total of $600 per year. Since many of you reading this are no doubt trying to piece together a meager living teaching CUNY students, I don’t have to tell you how little they already have and how hard they work just to stay on top of their tuition bills, much less their course reading and homework. Add to this Paterson’s proposals to slash the MTA budget, which will likely result in significant cuts in service as well as a potential fare increase, and it’s not hard to see the economic war that is being waged on the working poor of New York. While the poor are being asked to pay more and to get by with less in almost every aspect of their daily lives, those making well above $250,000 a year are being asked to sacrifice absolutely nothing.

Currently the New York State tax on income over $40,000 is 6.85%. That rate applies not only to those making $40,000 a year but to everyone making more than that marginally livable wage, regardless of how many millions of dollars they bring home each year. That means that many of us are probably paying exactly the same percentage of taxes as our esteemed Chancellor Goldstein, who makes $540,000 a year in wages and perks and has largely bent over backwards to accommodate the governor’s proposals for tuition hikes, while at the same time giving himself several significant raises. Indeed, since the late ‘70s New York State has reduced income taxes for the wealthiest New Yorkers by more than 50 percent, while simultaneously slashing services, raising public college and university tuition, and eliminating vital city and state programs. It is precisely this trend: giving tax breaks to the rich, and not the oft-touted economic burden of providing services to the poor that has created the enormous deficit the state now faces. Indeed, as other commentators have aptly noted, this fiscal crisis is very specifically a crisis of revenue, not spending, and to try to solve it by further cutting spending while refusing to increase revenue only goes to show how little our state representatives actually care about the living conditions of the majority of their constituency.

Thankfully, there is a growing number of citizens, unions, and grassroots political organizations who are pushing for a more reasonable and moral solution to the current state budget crisis, one that seeks to distribute the burden of that crisis in a more equitable way. The Working Families Party in conjunction with several state and municipal unions have proposed what they are calling a Fair Share Tax Reform bill. Introduced in the New York State Senate by Senator Eric Schniederman, the Fair Share Tax Reform Bill proposes a modest increase in taxes on those New Yorkers making above $250,000. The bill, which is gaining momentum in the state legislature (Thanks in part to the determined efforts of ordinary citizens and grassroots organizations), would raise the state tax rate on those making more than $250,000 from 6.85 percent to 8.25 percent. Likewise those making more than half a million a year would see their state tax rise to 8.97 percent, while those making more than a million dollars a year would be asked to pay 10.3 percent.

Even at the highest tax bracket proposed in the Fair Share Tax Reform Bill, this is a total increase of only 3.45 percent. That 3.45 percent, however, would, according to Fiscal Policy Institute of the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, generate as much as $6 billion a year for New York State. Furthermore, these increases would affect only a small portion of New Yorkers, (only the wealthiest 3.25 percent, according to The Working Families Party) and the few who would actually be affected are, let’s face it, uniquely situated to withstand a small decrease in their annual income.

Although there seems to be a growing consensus in the legislature that some kind of progressive tax reform is necessary, opponents of the Fair Share Tax Reform are gearing up to seek major compromises to the bill that would force more of the burden for the budget deficit onto poor working families. As the April 1 deadline for the next New York State budget quickly approaches, now is the time to take action. Contact your state senator and congressperson: send them a handwritten letter, send them a fax, or call them on the phone, and insist that they fully support, without compromise, the Fair Share Tax Reform package currently being considered by the state legislature. Even as the poorest Americans have become increasingly poor, the small minority of wealthy Americans have benefitted from decades of government giveaways. Now’s the time to take it back; The Fair Share Tax Reform Bill is a good first step in that direction.

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—Corinthians 13:11“In the epoch in which we now live, civilization is not an ideal or an aspiration, it is a video game.”

—Benjamin R. Barber

I am not one to gush, especially when it comes to American presidents and their speech writers, but there is something about Barack Obama’s inaugural invocation of St. Paul’s call to “set aside childish things,” that demands comment. Although he may not have intended it, Obama’s obligatory nod to scripture actually offered a surprisingly subtle and much needed critique of the sorry state of our American culture. “We remain a young nation,” said Obama, “but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history,” adding

In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted — for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things — some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

Clearly, Obama’s speech was meant to instill hope, not shame, in the hearts of his record-breaking audience that day, but his words seem to have offered a kind of indictment as well, for in calling out the lazy slackers, the pleasure seekers, the leisure enthusiasts (think John Kerry wind-sailing), the greedy and the fame obsessed (“Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?”), the president seemed to be saying in the gentlest and most indirect way possible: “knock it off and grow up already!”

While it’s hard not to agree with the spirit of Obama’s inaugural address, I’m afraid I am far less optimistic than our new president that the nation is actually capable of changing its ways. Although the metaphorical path described in Obama’s speech is not really any more rugged, steep, or treacherous than it’s ever been (it seems unlikely, at least for the short term, that our current recession will reach depression-era levels of poverty and unemployment), the stuffed and complacent consumers that comprise the mass of the American polity hardly seem up to the challenge. Like the fools that make up so much of our reality television we too seem destined not for greatness and fame but petty unhappiness, humiliation, and self pity.

Over the last four decades American culture has grown increasingly irresponsible and childish and it is amazing that our entire civilization, if we can call it that, hasn’t collapsed under the weight of its own collective stupidity. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Benjamin Button, we seem to be growing younger and more immature every day, even as the negative effects of our immaturity become increasingly more burdensome for the other cultures with whom we share the globe. The saddest part of this however, is that our cultural youthfulness is actually devoid of any truly youthful virtues. Instead of the healthy open-mindedness and kind-heartedness of a normal child; instead of the spirited and creative rebellion of a healthy and independent adolescent, our culture seems to have embraced only the negative aspects of youth and its selfish desire for quick and easy satisfactions, devoid of complexity, challenge, or struggle.

Indeed, our cultural immaturity has become so prodigious and all consuming that none of us, including me, seem to be immune to its narcotic effects. As Benjamin Barber, the prescient author of Jihad vs. McWorld, describes in his latest book Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole:

This infantilist ethos is as potent in shaping the ideology and behaviors of our radical consumerist society today as what Max Weber called the “Protestant ethic” was in shaping the entrepreneurial culture of what was then a productivist early capitalist society. Affiliated with an ideology of privatization, the marketing of brands, and a homogenization of taste, this ethos of infantilization has worked to sustain consumer capitalism, but at the expense of both civility and civilization and at a growing risk to capitalism itself. Although we use the term democratic capitalism in a manner that suggests a certain redundancy, the reality is that the two words describe different systems often in tension with one another. Consumerism has set the two entirely asunder.

In our post-industrial consumer society, Barber suggests, the distance between what we want and what we need has become so drastically contracted that our entire economy seems to depend upon and demand immaturity and consumer allegiance to the useless and increasingly unsatisfying products that surround us, few of which serve any purpose beyond offering an enchanting and temporary sense of novelty. Consider, for instance, the number of grown New Yorkers who pass their commutes, not reading or conversing with their friends or family, but playing video games, watching television programs on their phones, or listening to puerile pop music. Just like a child we seem to need constant stimulation and so we fill in all the otherwise thoughtful spaces of our lives with these kinds of media. Because healthy humans are not naturally inclined to such acts of stupidity, and because our consumer economy has become too big to fail, as it were, we therefore find ourselves deluged with a never-ending and increasingly conspicuous barrage of advertising that plays to our most base and, as Freud well knew, consequently our most childish desires in an effort to keep us in a permanent state of distraction. Like the child who sucks his thumb and cannot seem to move beyond the comforts of oral satisfaction (the increasing presence of sites like thumbsuckingadults.com seem to indicate the number of adult thumb suckers may also be on the rise), we seem to be stuck in our own consumerist stage of capitalist development, unable to mature beyond our most infantile and base desires. The feedback loop of advertising and desire, consumption and dissatisfaction has left us with little in our daily lives that is real or meaningful and so, like a child who doesn’t know any better (or an alcoholic or drug addict), we fill that emptiness with more of the same, eventually taking comfort in the very thing that we are trying to put behind us.

Obama’s call for service then, his call for “a new era of responsibility,” although a noble gesture, may very well be falling on deaf ears, for it is hard to believe that a people used to such easy distractions and insipid amusements as “Jackass” and “Nanny 911,” easy listening and smooth jazz, or the special effects train wrecks that pass for most Hollywood blockbusters, are intellectually capable of anything as profound as public service and personal sacrifice. As Barber makes clear, our post modern consumer culture, which promises total liberty and narcissistic individualism through the cathartic ritual of constant shopping, is a threat to more than just our happiness; it is a threat to democracy itself. We are so habitualized to the rituals of evening television and weekend shopping, the thought of spending an afternoon at a city council meeting, or a weekend volunteering for the parks department seems practically un-American.

As long as our economy continues to rise or fall based on the number of plasma screens or Nintendo Wiis that we collectively purchase, there is little hope that we will find either the time or the penchant for true democratic participation. John Dewey’s dream of a great community where every individual would have “a responsible share according to capacity in forming and directing the activities of the groups to which [he or she] belong[ed]” now finds its greatest expression in the Mall of America, where every individual is obliged to do his share of shopping according to the capacity of his wallet.

If there is a way out of this dilemma it won’t be easy and it probably won’t be something that we choose for ourselves. No economy can sustain itself exclusively through merger, speculation, acquisition, and reckless consumption. If we do not, as President Obama suggests, actually begin to make things again, it is clear that the system of capitalism as we know it is destined to reach a point of crisis from which we will not be able to return. This “tipping point,” as Malcolm Gladwell might call it, is possibly the best hope we have of actually recovering some sense of dignity and meaning in sacrifice and the challenges of a strenuous life. Until then we seem destined to a life of “quiet desperation,” cloying comforts, easy satisfactions, and hollow victories. 

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